


I Will Follow You (into the Dark)

by SylphofScript



Series: Everyday I'm Drabblin' [5]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Drabble, Hurt Jim, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-09 22:46:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10423500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylphofScript/pseuds/SylphofScript
Summary: A short drabble where Jim is hurt, Bones is needed to save him, and everything's going to shit around them.Mild side-Spock for your consuming pleasure.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [Recommended listening.](https://youtu.be/UU458s8zk1U)
> 
> Originally intended to be a drabble, I ended up writing almost 2,000 words for what was originally about 120 words. It doesn’t really match the song like it had in the beginning, but whatever. The song stays, because that's what sparked the story. 
> 
> Also might expand on this one day. Who knows. I say that about everything.

The sharp, massive shudder around him throws Leonard to his knees, and, for a moment, he can only see white. He can only hear the screaming in his ears, unable to process the world around him for a few bare seconds of panic and shock.

When his vision comes back, all he can see is flame devouring the metal of his bay.

“ _Patients to the escape pods_!” he screams, the walls of the ship already crumbling around them despite their location far from the outer breaches. Reaching out, he steadily removes the butt of a needle from the ensign he’d been bandaging, ignoring the blood that spurts out onto his fingers. The ensign is pale and too shaken to react. “Hold this,” Leonard tells him, gesturing to the wadded ball of gauze that he held to the gash on the ensign’s forehead, “and follow the others. We’re evacuating.  _Go_.”

The ensign startles, blinking at Leonard, then snaps back to himself and takes hold of his own situation. Leonard has already moved on by the time the gauze is taken from him. He helps someone collapsed against one of the biobeds, hauling her up onto his shoulder. The woman sways, a deep rip in her science blues. She needs stitches on more than just the uniform, but that would have to come later.

“Excuse me,” he tells her briefly, then lifts her up into his arms and runs her to the evacuation area, handing her off as Chapel appears and pushes a large white cotton pad at the women to catch the blood. 

“We’re getting everyone in,” Chapel tells Leonard. She shoves her PADD at him, and he tries to read the names from beneath the fingerprints of smudged blood. She starts to explain something else, but she’s cut off by someone’s voice coming out over the ship’s speakers.

“Doctor McCoy, if you are still on board the Enterprise, come to the bridge immediately.” It’s Sulu’s voice, and it sparks a jolt of panic in the back of Leonard’s mind. If Sulu has the bridge, where the hell is Jim? Leonard’s already shoving the PADD back at Chapel when Sulu speaks again, this time with a grim tone, “Quickly, Doctor. It’s urgent.”

\---

When he reaches the bridge, he’s startled to find the entirety of the night’s shift still lingering in a circle around what he can easily deduce is their—and his—captain. He curses quietly to himself, pulling the breath into his lungs.

“Evacuate!” Leonard commands them, stern and loud. They startle, whip heads covered in blood and filled with a shaken sort of terror around to look at him. One of them startles hard enough that he trips over a chair that had been ripped from the floor of the bridge. Leonard jabs an arm in the direction of the evacuation pods, willing his face to fill red with anger. With urgency. The ship was deteriorating quickly—however much time they had left to leave safely, it wasn’t much. “Evacuate  _now_ , we don’t have time for this!”

“The captain—” Sulu starts, his arms around the one who had fallen. 

“I’ll handle him.  _Go_ , Sulu.”

Sulu’s face is pale, speckled with something blue, but he nods and hauls the other man to his feet, and they depart with the majority of the crew that had been lingering. Within moments, the room is mostly empty, save for Spock, Uhura, himself, and Jim. Leonard can see him clearly now, through the crisscrossed bones of the metal bridge that twisted along the floor, cocooning Jim where he lay.

“What  _happened_?” Leonard hears himself asking, but he’s already within the metal nest, surveying the damage, his mind digging through his mental files of Jim’s pre-existing medical conditions. He hears Spock say something about a chance move to dodge the object that had barreled into them, and, even though they had missed the brunt of the force, it had clipped them. Jim had been somewhere—somewhere he was supposed to be, for once, of course—and the metal frame had fallen around him. On him. 

“Dammit, Jim.” Lacerations, external punctures, broken ribs and probably a leg. Internal damage unknown. Would he survive the evacuation pod if they put him in one? “I need—Shit, I need something to make sure he doesn’t move. Splints won’t do. I can’t throw him in the pod like this, it’ll snap him in two.”

“Do you have something to paralyze him? A hypo?” Uhura asks.

“He might have a bad reaction,” Leonard says, shaking his head. “I can’t risk it.”

“Something to wrap him in, then,” she tries next. “Like the suits. The ones that shrink once you’re in them. We could put something in there with him? Maybe—”

“The radiation suits.” Leonard could kiss her. “Someone could get in there with him, like a body-stint. Quickly, the med bay.”

Uhura nods, and in the next moment she’s gone. Leonard didn’t even have time to warn her the med bay might be gone when she gets there.

“The suit will not bend?” Spock asks as Leonard returns to pressing and poking Jim. Definitely broken ribs, but no punctured lung.

“Think of it like a straight jacket,” Leonard explains as he goes. “One of us will be wrapped around him, and his arms will go around one of us. The Suit should have enough of a hold to keep both in it, but we won’t be able to bend, not with each facing one another.”

Deep lacerations on Jim’s left leg. Did he wrestle a goddamned bear on his way down? What on earth could have caused such evenly, cleanly sliced—

Raw coughing jolts Leonard back from his mind as Jim rouses, mumbling something in a whisper. Spock startles, drops to his knees and looks over Jim like he can fix him if he could only find exactly how to.

“Jim, you  _idiot_ ,” Leonard breathes, then reaches to press a hand to Jim’s pulse. Though it had been steady just a moment before, it races now.  _Too fast_ , Leonard knows. He needs to return to unconsciousness. “You really threw yourself down the blasted shithole with this one.”

“The ship,” Jim chokes, his eyes opening to the ceiling. Leonard doesn’t have to look up to know it’s barely there. His hand goes to Jim’s wrist next, but, before he can do anything, Jim’s fingers are latching onto his palm in a grip that seems too strong.

“We are initiating evacuation,” Spock tells him in a voice that seems far too calm. He looks up at Leonard questioningly, even though his words are for Jim. “We are the last ones on the ship at this time.”

Leonard doesn’t know if this is true, but he doesn’t have time to figure it out. Scotty would be able to inform them later.  _Later_.

“We have to worry about you right now, Jim. You can’t leave like this, the landing could kill you. Hell,  _the ejection from the ship_  could kill you.”

“You’re a doctor, Bones, you’ve got this.” Jim chokes on his laugh, gripping Leonard’s hand with white knuckles as pain lashes through his chest. Spock’s at his other side, arms covered in blood up to his shoulders. There’s a slash marring his torso, his science blues hanging in in tatters around it, his green blood mixing strangely with Jim’s red. Leonard belatedly wonders how much of Jim’s journey was shared with Spock, and what had transpired for him to end up this way.

The room is heating up to unbearable temperatures. Leonard can feel perspiration beading on his forehead, soaking through his uniform. Just as he opens his mouth to tell Spock to go looking for Uhura, she bursts back into the room, suit in hand and hair in a waterfall around her shoulders. She’s soaked in sweat, which tells Leonard what the rest of the ship must be like.

“I’ve got it,” she declares, hurrying to Leonard’s side to drop the suit. She casts her eyes on Jim and gasps. “Captain!”

“Hey,” Jim says, but it’s a clear struggle.

“No,” Leonard cuts in sharply, whipping his arm up. “We’re not conversing. Uhura, evacuate. The less people to get out into the pods once we’ve got Jim strapped up the better.”

Affronted, Uhura’s lips part to argue, but Jim lets out a gurgling wheeze before she can say a word, and her expression falls into one of alarm. Briefly, she drops a hand to Leonard’s shoulder, gives it a squeeze, and then vanishes. The relief Leonard feels is miniscule, but it gets him back on task. 

“We’re going to have to sit you up,” Leonard tells Jim, his hands already unfolding the suit and checking for imperfections. Thankfully, it seems to be whole and in perfect condition. Without prompt, Spock’s hands slip underneath of Jim.

“Oh no,” Jim rattles out, and then falls unconscious with a choked noise. Alarmed, Spock removes his hands and gives Leonard a wide-eyed look. Though he curses, Leonard tries to keep himself from panicking. 

“No, you didn’t do anything,” he tells Spock. “I don’t even know how he was awake in the first place. There’s too much going on right now. You need to lift him up, Spock.”

It takes him a moment, but Spock complies, one hand along Jim’s shoulders and the other gingerly lifting him at the waist. Once the suit’s unfolded and ready, Leonard joins him. They get his legs into the suit as Leonard follows with his own, Spock’s frame proving potentially too wide to Jim’s slightly stockier build. Before they can get farther, something in the distance lets off a groaning noise that sends goosebumps up Leonard’s spine, then flames burst into the bridge. 

Both Spock and Leonard launch themselves against Jim in a way that scares Leonard as a doctor, but warms him as a friend. 

“We must hurry,” Spock says once he’s pulled away again, his eyes over Leonard’s shoulder, looking at what Leonard must assume is the bridge burning down around them. 

“I’m hurrying!” Leonard spits back, working as carefully as he can. “I’m not a miracle worker,” he says, the irony hitting him a second later, because he was a  _doctor_.

He’s a doctor, dammit, and that’s exactly what he needed to be.

Carefully, with the world melting in drips of silver and fire, Spock straps Jim to Leonard’s chest. He helps them into the evacuation pod, Leonard against the glass, and, with the feeling of hesitation that Leonard can’t prove, Spock sends them out into the depths of outer space.


End file.
